Atop the 150-meter tall Bank of America tower in Hong Kong is a sprawling garden where carrots, rhubarb, and radishes flourish! It is a welcome oasis amongst the steel and glass of the financial district in the heart of the city.
One of the cofounders of the tower top garden says that this is just one simple way to help people reconnect with nature and become a little more self-sustainable. Cofounder Andrew Tsui says the rooftop farms help people who want to grow in the current “instant-noodle city lifestyle” that sees so much waste.
“What we are looking at is really how to identify underutilized spaces among the city and mobilize the citizens, the people, to learn about food,” the 43-year-old told Associated Free Press during a site inspection of the skyscraper’s garden. Tsui believes Hong Kongers need to re-establish a relationship with what they eat that has been broken “since we started outsourcing our food and relying so much on industrialized production.”
That probably goes for much of planet Earth. Many have lost the will to even make an attempt to reconnect with the planet and cultivate a more self-reliant and organic lifestyle. Even though Hong Kong is densely packed with people, they are finding space and ways to grow nutritious foods.
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Many are finding the move toward a more localized food source and using our diet as our medicine a tough one! But people interested in a more natural lifestyle are no longer few and far between. Tsui said some seven million square meters of the farmable area is currently cultivated. But more than six million square meters on the city’s rooftops remain unused. “So we could have the potential of doubling the supply of land for growing food,” he said.
“The challenge for us is to design urban farming as a lifestyle to integrate into our daily life,” he added. “And the first step for that, of course, is to be accessible.”
Others have tried ideas similar to this! You can grow food almost anywhere, as long as you have the desire to try. People all over have realized what importance it is to eat healthily and keep the body running in tip-top shape. The constant bombarding of new coronavirus variants and people sulking in fear at them has made many of us realize just how important what we put in our bodies has always been.
Even though Tsui recognizes that few young Hong Kongers currently have an interest in learning how to grow food, he did say that younger people are often concerned about the environment and climate change, so the opportunity to generate enthusiasm is there for the taking. “If coding is the skill set to learn for the 21st century, growing your own food is a necessary new skill that we all need to learn to ensure a regenerative and green planet,” he said.
There is always a way to grow your own food, you just have to find it!